Two classes of solutions have been deployed for data sharing, like for example file sharing between user equipments in a communication network. One is the Publish/Subscribe system, whereas the other is the peer-to-peer network.
The Publish/Subscribe (pub/sub) system is one of the application-level key technologies concerning data dissemination among user equipments in a communication network. It involves a server called publisher and a client called subscriber. The publisher produces data in form of events, which are consumed by subscribers issuing subscriptions representing their interest in specific events.
A peer-to-peer (P2P) computer network uses diverse connectivity between users in a communication network and the cumulative bandwidth of network participants rather than conventional centralized resources where a relatively low number of servers provide the core value to a service or an application. P2P networks are typically used for connecting nodes via largely ad hoc connections. Recently, a new framework known as P4P (A Portal for Proactive Provider Participation in P2P) has been tested in some commercial network with the purpose to manage P2P applications.
The current developed P2P and pub/sub systems build and operate their overlay topology on top of the Internet infrastructure, in an independent mode with respect to the network level information. Actually, the current P2P systems and pub/sub system are inefficiently built and operated in the large scale Internet due to the fact that the routing of information in the application layer is unaware of the communication network in the lower layer, which is recognized as a serious drawback of the current approaches. The pub/sub system highly relies on the root node or central server of the system as the data is disseminated in the large scale network, which brings the problem of single-point of failure. As for the P2P systems, although some of them can avoid the single-point failure problem by organizing the network with Distributed Hash Table (DHT) technology, it is difficult to locate the intended data as the query for data searching is not explicit and as data on users are distributed among the users. Actually, most of the currently used P2P systems still rely on the central server to facilitate the data query. Therefore, P2P systems also encounter the problem of single-point of failure.
Another drawback of P2P systems is that the frequency and amount of data processing required on each user equipment acting as a peer node implies a fast exhaustion of the battery of the user equipment. It is therefore difficult to deploy P2P systems in communication network such as for example mobile communication networks.
Today there is no solution to efficiently share data that allows reducing battery consumption for user equipments and thus improving efficiency of such telecommunication systems.
Today there is a need for an data sharing solution that can be easily implemented on the existing communication infrastructures.